Pussy hat power.
Via Daily Caller:
TIME Magazine announced last week that its 2017 Person of the Year was “The Silence Breakers,” beating out runners-up Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Robert Mueller, Kim Jong Un, Colin Kaepernick and Patty Jenkins. “The Silence Breakers” are women who have “summoned extraordinary personal courage to speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs.”
No political party, industry, or ideological group is immune to problems of sexual harassment. Even with the significant advances made in civil rights and equal opportunities for women in the past half century, being a woman is still a disadvantage in many workplaces and situations where outright harassment or discrimination is excused or ignored. Across many industries and income levels, women remain afraid to report instances of abuse, harassment, or discrimination, for fear of losing their jobs or hindering their hard-won career advancement opportunities.
We live in a unique historical moment when brave women are coming forward with stories of sexual harassment they have experienced. Their courage emboldens other women to share their stories, and public sentiment is rapidly turning against the men who have harassed these women, in many cases for decades, without repercussions. This is an epochal – and overdue – cultural correction and change in thinking. It is tragic that, in a nation built on the idea that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, women were and are exploited with no recourse.
Why is this seismic shift in our culture happening now, in late 2017? According to TIME, the election of President Trump made women feel powerless, leading to the Women’s March, then to the individuals sharing their stories, culminating in the #MeToo social media movement. It turns out women were not so powerless after all. Indeed, the voices that were suppressed throughout the Clinton and Obama eras — and even while a woman, Hillary Clinton, ran a much-trumpeted historic campaign for President — now feel free, in 2017, to speak their minds, and to tell their stories. And the nation is listening, across the political spectrum.
President Trump’s election and first year in office may have motivated individual women to speak up, but not in the way TIME means. The Women’s March was primarily a political protest, in which conservative women were only welcome if they added to the protest attendance numbers without voicing their distasteful, non-progressive views – silent, complacent, required to subscribe to a version of “sisterhood” that did not reflect their individual and varied experiences. The exclusionary and didactic hypocrisy of mainstream feminism has been on full display this past year, shown for the hollow vessel that it is, promising much but delivering little.
And let’s not forget that the women who professed to feel so powerless after President Trump’s election have completely shunned — and instead mocked, belittled and attacked — the powerful senior women advisors to the President: counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway (who was the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign), White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, White House Director of Strategic Communications Mercedes Schlapp, Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and even President Trump’s own daughter Ivanka Trump (just to name a few).